Obfuscating email addresses

23 January 2009

I guess this probably gets me the prize for being first to blog on New Internationalist's new tech blog. And its a post about making life difficult for spammers. Yay!

I was just doing some work on the Clean Start pages, part of which was to add a mailto: link. Spammers are always scraping pages for mailtos, so I had a think about how one might obfuscate an email reasonably effectively. The traditional way is name [at] site [dot] com. Or you could do like riseup and have a button in the way of any email addresses. But a quite cute technique (though not totally unbreakable) is to use html entities to encode your email address. For example, for the Clean Start email, I would do: